Henry Doorly Zoo: World's Best, Built in Omaha

In twenty fourteen, TripAdvisor ranked Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium the best zoo on Earth, ahead of San Diego, ahead of Spain's Loro Parque, ahead of everywhere. If that surprises you, you probably have not been.

The zoo began in eighteen ninety-four as Riverview Park, a modest municipal animal collection. The transformation started in nineteen sixty-three, when Margaret Hitchcock Doorly donated enough money to rename and rebuild it in honor of her late husband Henry Doorly, a newspaper publisher. What the zoo became over the following decades was a product of a sustained institutional ambition that is unusual in a city Omaha's size.

The key figure was Dr. Lee Simmons, who ran the zoo from nineteen seventy until two thousand nine. Simmons understood that you do not compete with San Diego by doing what San Diego does. You build things that have never existed anywhere. In nineteen ninety-two he opened the Lied Jungle, then the world's largest indoor rainforest: eighty feet tall, one and a half acres, a suspension bridge swaying over a fifty-foot waterfall. Family Life Magazine named it the single best zoo exhibit in the country in nineteen ninety-four.

Then came the Desert Dome, the world's largest glazed geodesic dome and one of the world's largest indoor deserts, representing the Namib of southern Africa, the Red Centre of Australia, and the Sonoran Desert of the American Southwest, all under one glass dome. Below it, Kingdoms of the Night holds the world's largest nocturnal exhibit and largest indoor swamp. The aquarium added the world's largest indoor shark exhibit.

What the Henry Doorly Zoo proved is that a landlocked Midwestern city with no obvious zoo-going climate can become a destination for the world by building better than anywhere else. The polar opposite of thinking small.